AGE-C’s fourth lecture for the Cornelia Goethe Colloquium

The fourth lecture from AGE-C in the Cornelia Goethe Centrum lecture series was a joint presentation delivered on the 20th of December 2023 by the Romanian unit – Dr Andrea Virginás and drd Boglárka Angéla Farkas. In its first part, the lecture addressed 21st-century female characters of small national European cinemas that are marked by ageing, childlessness or infertility, represented as fighters of an ecologically inspired ‘war’ – synthesizing the extreme stereotypes of losing agility and future. The second part of the lecture aimed to introduce the archetype of the ‘wise old woman’ (the Crone figure), which offers complex cultural images that can find their echo in the postmenopausal ‘eco-warriors’ of small-national European cinemas. Along with several examples from Hungarian, Slovakian, Icelandic and Swedish cinemas, the presentation predominantly focused on Icelandic Woman at War (Benedikt Erlingsson, 2018), which helped to develop the main ideas of the lecture.

Virginás started the lecture by stating that the generational process of granddaughters, daughters and grandmothers is far from being represented as an idyllic interlinking. To contextualize (female) ageing, she introduced Kathleen Woodward’s six types of age (Woodward 2006) – chronological, biological, social, cultural, psychological and statistical age – pointing out that in the 21st century high chronological age becomes an effective possibility for more and more of us, especially women, who, according to global statistics tend to live longer than men. To give this phenomenon a more local context, Virginás brought in the statistics offered by the European Commission’s Eurostat database.

Furthermore, Virginás introduced the corpus of the lecture, starting with the paradigmatic example of Icelandic Woman at War, which presents 49-year-old Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir), a choir leader who leads a secret life, defined by ecological activism and eco-terrorism. In the meantime, the arguably menopausal Halla is in the process of adopting a child from Ukraine. Virginás – drawing from Karen Ballard’s Understanding Menopause (2003) and Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse (1970) – contextualized menopause as the cessation of the reproductive function of women, which leads to the stigmatization of aged women as ‘societal waste.’ Infertility – be it articulated explicitly as a consequence of the female ageing process, or as instances of mysterious childlessness, of artificial fertilization or of adoption of even non-human beings – is the marker of all these female characters that inhabit this film corpus (along with a penchant for fighting bigger or smaller ecological wars), from Hungarian examples, such as Eden (2020), On Body and Soul (2017) or Womb (2010) to Icelandic Lamb (2021) and Swedish Aniara (2018), among others.

Upon analysing the common nodes of these female characters, Virginás affirmed that these heroines don’t get the diegetic world’s attention and approval, in addition, their chronological and biological age do not coincide with their psychological age, hence arriving to the ambiguity of the ‘mothers (as) grandmothers’ formulation of the lecture’s subtitle.

Arguing that these cinematic representations – derived from different cultural and national contexts – have an archetypical and mythological underpinning, Farkas continued the lecture by presenting the archetype of the Crone (the wise old woman) and its origins as a prehistorical figure marked by the absence of menstrual blood – primarily based on D. J. Conway’s (1994),

Barbara Walker’s (1985) and Ruth E. Ray’s (2004) work on the topic. Then, she gave a quick historical overview of the Crone in patriarchal power structures, highlighting Greek mythology’s Moirai and Irish folklore’s banshees as concrete examples.

Leaning on Kathryn Rountree’s 1997 article called The New Witch of the West: Feminists Reclaim the Crone, Farkas underlined how the image of the Crone was reembraced by feminist activists and researchers in the second half of the 20th century, starting with the Goddess movement, which recontextualised the Crone figure as a mode of self-identification and self-empowerment for women. More specifically, feminist gerontology also saw the potential in the Crone, nevertheless, as Margaret Cruikshank (2003) pointed out, this archetype should not be used as a positive stereotype.

Moving on to the lecture’s primary case study, Woman at War, Farkas continued Virginás’ analysis of the film by contextualizing Halla not only as a Crone figure but also as an allusion to Greek mythology’s goddess, Artemis, who is childless and connected to nature, just like her cinematic counterpart. Furthermore, Farkas argued that Halla’s war brings into focus Kathleen Woodward’s 2003 article, Against Wisdom: The Social Politics of Anger and Ageing. According to Woodward, wisdom – which is a predominant feature of the Crone – often leads to ageism, constraining older people to passivity and stoic calm. As a solution, Woodward advocated anger, which “can be a sign of moral outrage at social injustice, at being denied the right to participate in society” (2003, 63). Thus, Farkas defined Woman at War as a cinematic representation of Woodward’s argument that constructs a ‘wise anger’ through Halla, who questions the restrictive social norms of ageing and motherhood, and who actively fights for a global cause. Towards the end of her presentation, Farkas briefly analysed an Icelandic documentary film, Sara Dosa’s 2019 The Seer and the Unseen, which once again features a Crone figure, a postmenopausal woman, who defines herself as a seer and is heavily involved in local environmental activism.

Arriving at the lecture’s closing remarks, Virginás contemplated the discussed female representations from an industry and decision-making perspective. She argued that the relatively unstructured and low-budget nature of small national, most often peripheral cinemas constitute fewer obstacles for the female workforce, with fewer ageist barriers present. As a consequence, older women might appear more frequently in decision-making positions in small national film and television production cultures.

The following Q&A, which was moderated by Dr Vinzenz Hediger, revealed that the audience showed great interest related to the topic. In this regard, the audience formulated questions, which touched upon the offensive stereotype of the ‘crazy old woman,’ the cultural images that connect women with nature and the social pressure concerning women, who deliberately choose childlessness – just to highlight a few talking points. Overall, the enthusiastic Q&A gifted Virginás and Farkas with a lot of thoughtful questions and comments that shall move their research forward.

Written by: Boglárka Angéla Farkas